The Place: Knightsbridge

The Drinks: Wine and some cocktails

The gentleman was tall, fit, muscular, looked exactly like his picture. Where did it all go wrong?

Probably about the time he asked if I had accepted Jesus Christ as my lord and saviour and began speaking about vibrational energy frequencies. At first it was only slightly alarming, as I thought “yeah honey, you just keep making those pretty words happen,” particularly as he had revealed himself to be a professional athlete, which was somewhat satisfying and the “don’t bother with the laundromat, help yourself to the washboard that is my abdomen” situation was making the drinks go down easy… But nothing else did.

After close to three hours of Gabbin’ with God, I decided I was revoking sex from the “on-offer” specials in my head – not that it mattered, though, because although he waxed poetic about my lips (and teeth) at the end of the night, he got really awkward and insisted he give me money for the taxi.

Was I nothing more to him than a Jesus-Beard?

]]>https://crassanova.wordpress.com/2012/05/11/omg-literally/feed/0glamwinkaka_jesusWelcome to the Hideously Truthful and Decidedly Sordid Confessions of an Online Dating Addict.https://crassanova.wordpress.com/2012/05/11/hello-world/
https://crassanova.wordpress.com/2012/05/11/hello-world/#respondFri, 11 May 2012 14:26:07 +0000http://crassanova.wordpress.com/?p=1Here’s the game:

I’ve joined as many online dating websites as possible in order to bring you the hilarious reality of online dating.

You’ll get the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the filthy, hideous, disastrous, hilarious truth on our journey together, scouring the vile little corners of the internet dating wasteland in search of some true-love-forever Match.com advert. So help me, Blog.

The Place: Marylebone

The Drinks: Wine

The Gentleman was suited and booted and looked like his picture. Ahead of the game! However, things began to get a bit dicey when he started sweating uncontrollably and then over-apologizing for it, saying that he had just been to the gym beforehand. I found this rather unbelievable given that he was wearing a three-piece suit with a pocket watch (because you brought that to the gym, right?) and furthermore that he was stammering excuse after excuse about it. In hindsight, I should have just taken the cue from the three-piece, which was salmon and reminded me of upholstery fabric used to stiffen a Zoot suit and give the impression of bigger shoulders.

Still, it’s flattering that someone is nerve wracked and shining their best shoes (or in this case, suit) in anticipation of meeting me, so I treated the situation kindly (or blindly, if you prefer) disregarding the hyperhydrosis situation entirely and instead engaging in witty repartee.

Rather than ask me anything about myself (do they not teach you this at all-boys’ school?), the gentleman proceeded to regale me with unending stories of things he had done as a teenager; about the time his parents had left him in charge of the house and he’d done something or other that was naughty, blah blah blah blah GLORY DAYS.

I can’t honestly say what was more tragic; the fact that he clearly could not converse without reminiscing about how super awesome amazing radical cool he was in the 1980/90’s or the fact that he did not have the people skills to recognize he was boring me out of any possibility for a second course, never mind a second date.

The Place: Chelsea

The Drinks: Cocktails (and more)

The gentleman seemed perfect for me – said all the things I wanted to hear from a prospective online date; “I am tall, attractive, interesting, financially solvent, socially gregarious,” et cetera. I pointed out that “socially” and “gregarious” were synonyms and asked if he planned to bring his thesaurus with him on our date, and luckily he responded cleverly, “my thesaurus got donated to the British Museum ; all of those bones took up too much room.” Yes, for that small fee of terrible humour, gentlemen receive the opportunity to win me over in person.

I usually try to arrive a few minutes late, to clock the venue and see if I can glimpse someone with Judge Doom eyes (Who Framed Roger Rabbit), in which case a quick jaunt around the park and only the text messages remain of this “meeting” you claim was meant to happen. In any event, the lady ought not to be sitting alone for the gentleman to approach her in public (shock horror) so this is the key to meeting online dates. Be late. And if they’re later than you, keep in mind they likely had the same die, but subtract points off the final score.

I was not impressed with the gentleman; he had clearly used a photograph from ages before and seemed a mite plumper, having aged overnight. All of a sudden 34 seemed like a hilarious joke (on me), and I was tempted to ask if he’d had a hard road on the way to financial solvency, hence all the crows nesting in his eye-region and the jowls setting in. Making money is hard work. I ordered a drink anyhow, and chatted away, neutralizing all thoughts of romance, and simply allowing myself to be entertained.

He was rapt and leaning in and seemed ever so excited, which I soon twigged was down to his right hand not leaving the pocket of his trousers for the duration of our encounter, and which also never left as I said good-bye (nor did he bother to stand, thank goodness). I left the venue with a new lesson in mind: beware the gentleman who tells you what you want to hear, then takes you somewhere with long tablecloths.

The Place: Chancery Lane

The Drinks: Champagne

Now, I know you gentlemen out there think we ladies will complain about anything, and while that is clearly very true, there is such a thing as “too much of a good thing”. Yes, of course we all want to meet a gentleman who thinks of sweet and charming little things to make us feel special, but here’s a rapid-fire way to NotInterestedville, via uncomfortable OTT gestures.

While making an effort to take your lady somewhere she’d like, this lady knows for a fact that most men are not too keen to have a meatless meal, so I was somewhat impressed when the gentleman made an effort to take me to what was written up as some sort of central London vegetarian paradise. His pictures were attractive, he had that “nice smile/eyes/shoulders” thing going on where I thought he’s bound to have some personality defect, but talking on the phone and via text was fine, in fact, he was attentive, charming, funny, cool.

Or so I thought until I met him and he surprised me with a massive bouquet of flowers at the restaurant. While other people gazed on as if he was ‘the best boyfriend ever’, I felt as though it was totally cringeworthy, as there was a handwritten card in a twelve-year-old’s ham-fisted scrawl, which read: “flowers fit for a PRINCESS. Hey, I’ve got to keep you on your toes, somehow”. Uh, Waiter? I don’t think I ordered this side of puuuuuuuke.

Needless to say the overelaborate gesture cost him the game and the title, as I couldn’t possibly be expected to fancy someone so overly keen who’d never even really bothered to get to know me – he’d just decided to throw his awkward A-game in my direction before ever meeting me in person. Sorry, sweetheart. There is such a thing as Too Much, Too Soon, Tuned Out.

The Place: Kensington High Street

The Drinks: Vodka, Vodka, Vodka

Funny, you didn’t mention “I am a completely mental freakshow of a human being and happen to be eleventy feet tall and weigh 4 st” in your advert…

So the gentleman met me at the station, where it was difficult to make him out as he happened to be standing next to a forty-foot-tall column. He reminded me immediately of Lurch from The Addams Family, but unfortunately he didn’t have the same conversational style, which would have been a vast improvement on the constant hyper nervous babbling coming out of this individual as he loped down the street like my actual shadow (because your shadow is all long and lean, right?) “oh, i know i’m not your usual type but trust me, what you’re seeing now is just a prototype and I will be totally ripped in two weeks!”

Even if you meet someone for an online date and know immediately it’s a “no”, one has to be polite, however, politeness will only carry a gentleman so far, particularly if he’s carried his “date” into an awkward therapy session about his ex, and how she did x, y and z, and how he can “change” and all that, twenty minutes into conversation. Hi, remember me? I’m the one you’re trying to impress by not being totally weird and needy.

The pub – a pub!!!! – he took me to was hideous, brightly lit, and full of chavs, which makes it the single absolute worst place out of the approximate 500 places in that area to take a date – certainly this date. Awkward got awkwarder as he started acting like the hardman he most certainly was not, saying things like “no one else can take any physical pain or psychological torture like I can.” Fair enough, you might think, as he was from a “naughty” website’s online personal ads, but it wasn’t even as though he was being shocking or “sexy”, he was just weird and clingy and desperate to seem “in control”.

Some people will not take “let’s be friends” for an answer, this “gentleman” was one of them. I subsequently received about 15,000 text messages in the days following the date which ranged from “why don’t you like me” to “fuck you, you dumb bitch” and all that. Charming!

The Place: Covent Garden

The Drinks: Champagne

I met the gentleman at a bar in Covent Garden. To my dismay, he had picked a place that was blatantly advertising a two-for-one coupon for after-work drinks. Really? I mean, are we that obvious?

Not that “cheap” wasn’t cute. It’s just that he wasn’t cute. He did, however, look exactly like his picture, but what was weird was that there seemed to be a stretchiness to his picture (like when HD isn’t real HD and everything seems really narrow), which of course I attributed to the internet/display pictures being what they are (mostly dreadful). Big mistake. His face actually was so narrow I felt like at any moment he might bang out a bag of the white stuff on the horrible lounge table and start using his forehead to carve lines.

Here’s where things took a turn for the “worth”. He had managed to conceal a fairly ridiculous speech impediment during out chat on the phone prior to meeting – so he was obviously aware of it. However, you can’t really hide such a thing when you’re yelling “Garthon! More Thampagne!” Before you think of me as even bigger bitch, I really don’t mind if someone has a speech impediment, or is missing an arm, or an eye, or whatever; but tell the person about it beforehand/don’t hide it. Hiding it just makes it a filthy, dirty secret. In fact, if you’ve got a face like the Man in the Moon, you ought to be disclosing that as well. If Jay Leno has to, so do you, buddy. You probably get a tax credit for it, anyway.

After accepting a second drink from him I indicated that I didn’t feel any love connection, and he began to sulk. I “pomised” we should “be friends” and then I ran like the wind to the tube station saying “See you never!”

The Place: Fulham

The Drinks: Wine and some cocktails

The Gentleman was attractive enough, possibly even more than his original photo, which had caught my eye. He quickly suggested going out to eat, and as there was a) nothing in the house and b) the prospect of potentially coming back to the house with Mr Investment Banker for the remainder of the evening.

He picked me up in his Audi, which he rambled on about for several minutes and which I would have tuned out completely, except for the fact that everything he said was just so interesting and had the word Audi in it. Who loves a captive audience? THIS GUY!

We went for dinner at a really nice Indian place, although it would’t have been my first choice for a first date, but then again, why would anything possibly be my choice? Choice? Huh? You’re paying, so you get to tell me what I’m having, obviously. He seemed upset when I didn’t touch the lamb. I sweetly told him I was a vegetarian. Whoops.

While watching him inhale rice pudding (really, really, really unappetizing, food- and sexy-wise) he told me, between mouthfuls, “Yeah… You’ll sleep with me on the Third Date,” as if he was performing a soliloquy for the otherwise empty restaurant. Charming man! I went home in a taxi. I asked the driver to say the word “Audi” every four seconds until I landed back at home, sans-jerk!

The Place: Carnaby Street

The Drinks: Cocktails

The gentleman’s picture did him justice: was tall, fit, looked exactly like his picture. However there was one issue – the fact that his head was eight times the size of his body.

As a rule of thumb, when looking through online dating websites (or ‘going man-shopping’, as I like to call it), one has to take photographs with a grain of salt. Is he perhaps using a fisheye lens to make those shoulders look bigger? Has he superimposed that chin-dimple? Does he really have a unicorn horn, or has he just photoshopped that in to make himself look better? It’s important to view and review the pictures before committing to meeting a possible/probable mentalist IRL. However, this one got the better of me.

Sometimes, if someone’s using a screenshot from Skype, it makes them seem as though their head is quite a lot bigger, being that it is in the foreground of the image. And so you think, not a bad looking chap, really, and he seems nice enough on the phone and all that – so let’s do this thing! You might even choose to add in a hand-clap at that point. You’re amped.

Then take this whole hypothetical situation and make it have happened to ME, and when the gentleman shows up to meet me, he shows up with a giant head. No, that was not an issue of “perspective”, that was an issue of “reality”. There’s practically no room in the bar because his head is ballooning (bloating) with beer and his ego seems not to have taken any notice that there is no cause to be so up yourself when all you’ve got on offer is a horrible series of work-related anecdotes.

The Place: Battersea

The Drinks: Wine (for her), Water (for him)

I love a good cheap first date. It really provides the impetus to leave midway through. Key point: if a so-called ‘gentleman’ behaves in a way that is ungentlemanly, one is well within one’s rights to abscond immediately.

The gentleman arrived looking several years older (and balder) than his online portrait. Perhaps he was a reverse Dorian Gray; I’ll certainly never know. After settling into the bar of his choosing and bragging about his Porsche (keys left on the table, in case you didn’t hear it the first time and forgot to drop your knickers), he conveniently “forgets his wallet”.

What does a lady do in this instance? I don’t know, I suppose we’ll have to find one and ask her. This ‘lady’ replied, “I suppose you’ll be having tap water, then.” The conversation went downhill, as one would expect, but surely, if you’ve made such a fuss about your silly million-mph car, you can get back in it, zip back home and get your wallet, no? Well, as I said, I guess you’ll be having tap water.